Month: September, 2017

Desert Foxx don’t seem to have anything to do with Nazi generals, and there’s nobody in the band named Rommel. If you have to squeeze the trio into a category, postrock would work. Film music, ambient soundscaping, jazz improvisation and deep noir also factor into bassist/bandleader Mike DeiCont’s compositions. Their intriguing new ep Kill Together is streaming at Bandcamp, and they have a gig on Oct 4 at 6 PM at Cornelia Street Cafe with special guest multi-reedman Levon Henry. It’s a great deal: cover is ten bucks and includes a drink!

The album is a darkly cinematic triptych. The first track, For Giants opens with a mysterious temple-gong ambience from drummer Alex Kirkpatrick that rises to a hailstorm of cymbals, then there’s a sudden explosion of guitar squall from Louis Cohen over a slow, bludgeoning beat: Brandon Seabrook in slow-mo and Mick Barr come to mind.

Bring Us Home begins just as slowly but at the other end of the telescope, deep-sky tremolo guitar and Kirkpatrick’s tinkling piano building a rich, ominously melancholy, Lynchian ambience – until Cohen hits his distortion pedal and the wrath kicks in again. From there they go back to closing time at Laura Palmer’s favorite Twin Peaks corner drugstore, then firebomb the joint.

The final cut is Where We Burn the Bodies, with its spare, slow, stately bass chords, distant guitar and drum flickers amid the smoke off the battlefield. If an album is supposed to leave you wanting more, this one earns a perfect score. Has any band this potentially explosive ever played the Cornelia? Doubtful. Go on the fourth, have a free drink and find out for yourself.

Last night at the Kitchen nonprofit music advocates Blank Forms staged the first performance of Maryanne Amacher’s Adjacencies since a Carnegie Hall concert in 1966. A mesmerized, sold-out audience was there to witness a major moment in New York music history, performed by Yarn/Wire percussionists Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg.

The music shifted slowly and tectonically, from sepulchral flickers, to vast washes of sound punctuated by playful rhythmic accents, occasionally rising to an epically enveloping intensity that bordered on sheer horror and then fell away. The premise of the suite – the only surviving graphic score from Adjoins, a series the composer wrote while still in her twenties – is to subtly shift the sonic focus via quadrophonic speakers, mixed live with a meticulous, artful subtlety by Daniel Neumann and Woody Sullender.

The influence of Stockhausen – an early advocate for Amacher – and Edgar Varese (in a less wilfully assaultive moment, maybe) were apparent, but ultimately this piece is its own animal. Amacher’s score separates the passages into five specific tonal ranges, leaving the rest up to the performers. Greenberg was more or less in charge of bowing, Antonio with hitting, although they switched roles, at one point with considerable wry humor.

Both players stood amid a practically identical set of instruments: cymbals, twin snare drums, marimbas, gongs, circular bell tubes, propane canisters (presumably empty) and a big oil drum on its side. Coy oscillations contrasted with slowly rising, ominous low-register ambience. A pair of autoharps (the original score calls for concert models) were bowed, plucked and hammered in varying degrees for resonance rather than distinct melodies.

Familiar images – intentional or not – which came to mind included busy city traffic, distant conversations amid a bustling crowd, jet and electric engines, and a hailstorm or two. The most striking, creepiest moment came when Greenberg bowed the lowest tube on his marimba, channeling a murky discontent from the great beyond. A refrain eventually appeared, but from a different vantage point, at about the two o’clock mark if you consider centerstage to be high noon.

On one hand, it was tempting to the extreme to just sit back, eyes closed, and get lost in the music. On the other, the constantly shifting action onstage was also a lot of fun to watch – the suspense never let up, finally coming full circle with a whispery unease. The performance repeats tonight, Sept 30 at 8; cover is $20. In a stroke of fate, this two-night stand equals the total number of times the piece was previously performed.

The next event at the Kitchen after this is on Oct 3 at 7 PM with rare footage of golden-age CBGB bands the Talking Heads, Heartbreakers, Tuff Darts and others filmed there by the Metropolis Video collective over forty years ago. Admission is free: get there early and expect a long line.

Saturday night at Drom, Turkish crooner Halil Sezai eventually got the crowd singing along. But he didn’t do it with flag-waving Eurovision-style stadium cliches. He did it with a carefully crafted set of allusive, slow-to-midtempo ballads about revolution and the relentless stress of life in a police state, in styles ranging from moody parlor pop, to methodically crescenddoing anthems awash in minor keys, with microtonally-infused fills and solos delivered by his absolutely brilliant clarinetist. To call this music for our time is an understatement to the extreme.

Sezai sat for the duration of the show, which made sense considering that he doesn’t overemote. Although he’d build to long, resonant phrases to cap off a chorus, he sang with remarkable restraint, always seemingly holding something in reserve. Although he doesn’t have a particularly low voice, he didn’t fly up the scale, remaining grounded in his upper midrange.

Likewise, his band had a nuance matched by few rock bands. Turkish rock tends to be more informed by classical and Turkish traditional music – or in its loudest moments, European metal – than it is by comparatively simple American pop. About three songs into the set, all of a sudden a tersely swaying drumbeat entered the picture. As it turned out, the drummer had been there all along, but up to that point he’d just been adding just the ghostliest flickers of a cymbal or a rimshot.

An acoustic rhythm guitarist held a steady, emphatic forward drive while the group’s superb, eclectic pianist ranged from stately, angst-fueled neoromantic lines to a few detours toward early 80s jazz when the clarinetist switched to alto sax. The bassist would often open a song with judiciously fingerpicked acoustic guitar leads, then in a flash would put down the guitar and then hold down the lows on his four strings. The clarinetist’s volleys of tremoloing, deep-woods mystery and sometimes the macabre contrasted with the low-key sonics behind him. Botanica, and Firewater, and maybe Procol Harum came to mind, but with less emotive vocals than any of those art-rock bands.

Besides being New York’s most welcomingly intimate venue for sounds from around the globe, Drom is one of the few American clubs to regularly book Turkish rock music. There are two fantastic, very different bands there tomorrow night, Sept 30: at at 8 PM, wild accordion-driven Chilean psychedelic band Pascuala Ilabaca y Fauna are the latest stars from outside the country to make their US debut here: $15 adv tix are highly recommended. Then at 11:30 PM there’s a free show by excellent Queens rebetiko band Rebet Asker, playing dark Greek gangster and hash-smoking anthems from the 20s through the 40s.

In his New York debut this evening, Agadez, Niger duskcore guitarist Mdou Moctar told a packed house at Lincoln Center that “The desert isn’t for the Tuareg anymore.” Beyond those catastrophic implications, the Sahara’s loss is the world’s gain. With that, he let his guitar and his songs do the talking.

Like Hendrix and Albert King (and Otis Rush, Randi Russo, and many more), Moctar is a lefty, which might have something to do with how much more eclectic his sound is compared to his desert brethren. The revolutionary anthem he opened with was remarkably straightforward, building to a resolute crescendo over his drummer’s straight-up, swaying rock beat, the rhythm guitarist holding down a simple, syncopated strum. Meanwhile, Moctar fingerpicked psych-blues riffs through his wah, varied his textures and found a fourth stone from the sun. This is what the vastness of the desert inspires, especially if you’ve grown up there.

His vocals had a similar confidence and resilience. But the ache and longing in the opening riffage of his second number transcended any linguistic limitation and resounded even as the boomy triplet groove picked up steam. Llike any other jamband leader, Moctar works long serpentine solos, but with more dynamics and also more chord changes than this style is known for. Likewise, his hooks are as catchy as they get.

He’d leave a string open to resonate, raga style as he spun silky filigrees with his hammer-ons, leaving lots of space in between runs: the effect raised the impact the louder and faster he played. He kicked off one tune with gently shivery tremolo-picking, then the band hit a groove that was practically a waltz, finally hitting his distortion pedal for an almost venomous intensity. He stayed in red-flame, whirlwind mode for the next song as the two other musicians ran hypnotic triplets that echoed off the walls: at this point, it was clear that they weren’t missing anything by not having a bass player. Finally, toward the end, he left the midrange for a single shriek up high: talk about choosing your moment to make a point!

Echoes of Led Zep, a wryly impromptu drum solo and an even funnier disco interlude punctuated a long tuning episode: Moctar’s ear is so fine-tuned to overtones that he doesn’t use a digital tuner. He rewarded the crowd for their patience with the night’s most sizzling intro and then an irresistible if very subtle Paul Desmond quote.

The next stop on Moctar’s US tour is this Saturday night, Sept 30 at the Howland Center, 477 Main St. in Beacon, New York; cover is a ridiculously affordable $10. The atrium space at Lincoln Center has become one of Manhattan’s hottest spots for global music: the next free concert there is on Oct 5 at 7:30 PM with the charismatic “Duque de la Bachata,” Joan Soriano; the earlier you get there, the better.

Why are so many of the best jazz albums made by bands led by drummers? Because they have the deepest address books: everybody wants to play with the good ones. Kate Gentile is the latest to keep this hallowed tradition going – her darkly vivid, intensely focused new album Mannequins is streaming at Bandcamp. She has an album release show coming up on a weird but excellently eclectic bill on Oct 3 at 11 PM at the Silent Barn. Art-rocker Martin Bisi – who may do his vortical morass of guitar loops at this one – opens the night at 8, followed by the album release show by assaultive shredmeister Brandon Seabrook‘s Needle Drive and then math-shred duo Bangladeafy. Cover is a measly $8.

As you would expect from a multi-percussionist – she also plays vibraphone here -, her compositions are very diversely rhythmic. The album is a jazz sonata of sorts, variations on a series of cell-like themes, interspersed with miniatures, some of them pretty funny. Matt Mitchell’s distorted synth fuels the staggeringly syncopated opening track, Stars Covered in Clouds of Metal – it comes across as super-syncopated late 70s King Crimson and quickly disintegrates.

Jeremy Viner’s tenor sax and Mitchell’s piano team with the drums for a sardonically blithe theme as Trapezoidal Nirvana pounces along like a Pac Man on acid, Gentile and Adam Hopkins’ bass anchoring a blippy piano solo as the rhythm slowly falls away. The starscape midway through, Gentile going for a noir bongo feel with her rims and hardware as Mitchell sparkles eerily and Viner wafts uneasily, is especially tasty. Again, King Crimson comes to mind, especially as the crescendo builds.

Unreasonable Optimism pairs unsettlingly syncopted piano, vibes and sax, Gentile entering to provide some welcome ballast and gravitas. Mitchell’s creepy, Mompou-esque belltone piano takes centerstage as bass and drums prowl the perimeter diligently and then drop down to sepulchral wisps along with the sax.

The sardonically titled miniature Hammergaze evokes Kenny Wollesen’s gamelanesque explorations. Otto, on Alien Shoulders revisits the album’s tricky metrics, but more playfully, with squirrelly piano and squiggly electronics. The group follows the aptly and amusingy titled Xenormorphic with Wrack, bustling with animated sax and spiraling piano, the closest thing to mainstream postbop swing here. Then they run the knotty cells of Cardiac Logic.

Rattletrap drums, squalling and then furtive sax make way for deep-sky piano and vibes, then conjoin in the brief diptych Full Lucid. Likewise, the portentous atmospherics of Sear cede the path to the uneasily Messianic piano/sax lattices, steadily cascading variations and wry birdhouse tableau of Micronesia Parakeet.

The album winds up with two massive epics. Alchemy Melt [With Tilt] has a broodingly altered boogie interspersed within jauntily flickering interludes and more of those moodily bubbling cells, punctuated by a long, squiggly Viner solo. Does SSGF neatly synopsize everything? More or less, with stately/exploratory piano dichotomies, a brief bass solo, percolating sax and Gentile’s subtle wit. It ends distinctly unresolved. If you want entertainment and intensity, the album has plenty of both.

Pianist David Greilsammer addressed an intimate Harlem crowd last night with the utmost seriousness. He took care to explain that he typically never introduces the music on the bill since he wants it to speak for itself.

But this was an unusual program. He pondered the viability of playing organ or harpsichord works on the piano. He addressed the need to reaffirm classical music’s relevance, to be true to how historically radical and transgressive much of it is. Perhaps most importantly, he asserted, a performer ought to put his or her heart and soul into the music rather than maintaining a chilly distance.

That close emotional attunement came into vivid focus with the uneasy, insistent poignancy and emphatic/lingering contrasts of Janacek’s suite On the Overgrown Path, which Greilsammer interpolated within segments of works by Froberger, Mozart, C.P.E. Bach, Jean-Fery Rebel and a moodily dynamic world premiere by Ofer Pelz. Greilsammer averred that he’d been inspired to do this by a nightmare where he found himself stuck in a labyrinth.

Was this shtick? He considered that question too. As he saw it, that’s a judgment call. Mashing up segments of various composers’ works isn’t a new concept, but it is a minefield. An ensemble at a major New York concert space took a stab at a similar program last year and failed, epically. By the audience reaction – a standing ovation in the rich, reverberating sonics of the crypt at the Church of the Intercession – Greilsammer earned a hard victory.

Just the idea of trying to wrangle less-than-awkward segues between the baroque and the modern sends up a big red flag. But Greilsammer pulled it off! At about the midpoint of Janacek’s surreal, disorienting nightmare gallery walk, there’s a wrathful, exasperated low-lefthand storm, and Greilsammer didn’t hold back. Likewise, Froberger’s notes to the performer are to deliver the stately grace of his Tombstone suite with as much rubato as possible, and the pianist did exactly that, with a similar if vastly more subtle wallop.

That piece bridged the gap to thoughtful, purposeful, considered takes of the unfolding layers of Mozart’s Fantasy in C Minor and C.P.E. Bach’s Fantasy in F Sharp Minor. The Pelz premiere made an ominously lustrous centerpiece. It was only at the end, where each coda took its turn, that the feel of dominoes falling away crept in: maybe next time, one coda would be enough, considering how decisively each of these pieces ends. Thematically, it all made sense, pulling bits and pieces of one’s life together on a long, tortuous path that finally reached a triumphant clearing.

The concert’s organizers’ url is http://www.deathofclassical.com (they’re held in a church crypt, get it?). There’s also food and wine, a very generous supply, at these shows, conceived to dovetail with the music. A firecracker 2014 Galil Mountain Viognier, from Galilee, with its sparkle on the tongue and lingering scorched-butter burn at the end, was the highlight. An impressively diverse date-night crowd seemed as content with it as they were with the music.

Lithuanian-American violinist/composer Abraham Brody covers a lot of ground. In a wry bit of Marina Abramovic-inspired theatricality, he’ll improvise as he stares into your eyes, a most intimate kind of chamber concert. He also leads the intriguing Russian avant-folk quartet Pletai (“ritual”) with vocalist-multi-instrumentalists Masha Medvedchenkova, Ilya Sharov and Masha Marchenko, who reinvent ancient Lithuanian folk themes much in the same vein as Igor Stravinsky appropriated them for The Rite of Spring. The group are on the bill as the latest installment in Brody’s ongoing series of performances at National Sawdust on Oct 5 at 7:30 PM. Advance tix are $20 and highly recommended.

Brody’s album From the Dark Rich Earth is streaming at Spotify. It opens with the methodically tiptoeing It’s Already Dawn, its tricky interweave of pizzicato, vocals and polyrhythms bringing to mind a male-fronted Rasputina. The ominously atmospheric Leliumoj goes deep into that dark rich earth, disembodied voices sandwiched between an accordion drone and solo violin angst.

Green Brass keeps the atmospheric calm going for a bit and then leaps along, Brody’s wary Lithuanian vocals in contrast with increasingly agitated, circular violin. Aching atmospherics build to a bitterly frenetic dance in Orphan Girl. In Linden Tree, a web of voices weaves a trippy round, joined by plaintively lustrous strings.

Father Was Walking Through the Ryefield begins with what sounds like an old a-cappella field recording, then dances along on the pulse of the violin and vocal harmonies, rising to a triumphant peak. Oh, You Redbush, with its hazy atmosphere, and insistently crescendoing bandura, reaches toward majestic art-rock and then recedes like many of the tracks here. Likewise, the mighty peaks and desolate valleys in The Old Oak Tree.

Spare rainy-day piano echoes and then builds to angst-fueled neoromanticism in the distantly imploring I Asked. Strings echo sepulchrally as the ominous, enigmatic Litvak gets underway. Then the band build an otherworldly maze of echoing vocal counterpoint behind Brody’s stark violin in Trep Trepo, Martela.

The group revisit the atmosphere of the opening cut, but more gently, in Green Rue, at least until one of the album’s innumerable, unexpected crescendos kicks in. The final cut is the forcefully elegaic piano ballad A Thistle Grows. Fans of Mariana Sadovska’s bracing reinventions of Capathian mountain music, Aram Bajakian’s sepulchral take on Armenian folk themes or Ljova’s adventures exploring the roots of The Rite of Spring will love this stuff.

In the perennially popular demimonde of Tuvan throat-singing ensembles, Alash are akin to what Huun-Huur-Tu were doing in the early days before they were discovered by the ambient and techno crowds. At this point, Alash’s music is both more rustic and upbeat than their grey-sky brethren’s recent work. The trio of multi-instrumentalist/singers Bady-Dorzhu Ondar, Ayan-Ool Sam and Ayan Shirizhik also distinguish themselves with a puckish sense of humor that really comes across in their live show. Their latest album Achai is streaming at Spotify; the World Music Institute is bringing them to Merkin Concert Hall on Oct 1 at 7:30 PM for $25.

For newcomers to the genre, or those who haven’t tried throat-singing themselves (it’s not that difficult), music from the central Asian steppes is like nothing you’ve ever heard before. Flute melodies sail over clanky, trebly acoustic doshpuluur and chanzy lutes, and frequently, clicking percussion instruments made from animal bones while the singers create strange, high harmonics oscillating from the back of their throats. Some of the melodies utilize the Asian pentatonic scale, but more often than not they don’t. Alash like methodically crescendoing one-chord jams, but also tend to keep their songs on the short side. This album makes a good introduction.

The first track, For My Son, sets a super-low bass vocal melody beneath what’s essentially a brisk boogie blues guitar tune – it’s amazing how low these guys can sing. The flute-and-guitar tune Let’s Fatten the Livestock starts out with a whisper and builds to a mighty, bullish anthem, then rises and falls with a spring breeze of a flute solo.

Stark, bluegrass-ish igil two-string fiddle wafts over delicate guitar fingerpicking on the next track, Don’t Let Me Freeze, which never slides into the terror it alludes to. The briskly strolling Karachal is a launching pad for some pretty spectacular low-register vocals: unlike other groups, Alash sing actual lyrics, not just vocalese, from the stygian depths of their registers!

Mezheegei has a grimly cinematic, windswept feel punctuated by delicate guitar and flute over resonant fiddle. Only You is a spare, brooding accordion waltz. The long, slow, moody ballad Kosh-Oi and Torgalyg is the catchiest, most anthemic number here.

The Black Bird has a hypnotically galloping bounce, while My Throat the Cuckoo is a droll, catchy exercise in birdsong riffs. The album’s title track is its darkest and most atmospheric, while the final cut, Let’s Relax, is its gentlest yet most epic. There’s also a perambulating flute-and-percussion solo and a pensive, overtone-spiced atmospheric fiddle-and-vocal piece. Count this as one of the most strangely beguiling albums of recent months.

A major moment in the history of classical music in New York took place last night at Steinway Hall, where Leann Osterkamp gave a breathtaking and often breathless performance of Leonard Bernstein works for solo piano. Had such a program ever been staged in this city? Definitely not in the last thirty years, possibly never. There have been thousands of all-Bernstein programs performed here over the decades, and Bernstein conducted a handful of those from the piano. But beyond playing for his friends and family, it’s not clear if the composer himself ever gave a solo recital here.

Even Osterkamp, whose new Steinway album comprises all kinds of rare Bernstein solo works which she unearthed during some herculean research at the Library of Congress, couldn’t solve that mystery. If this was in fact a first, it was one worthy of the composer. As Nancy Garniez has asserted, a composer’s private works can be even more interesting than those written for public performance, and some of these pieces were exactly that. One of the most revealing numbers was written for his daughter Jamie, who was in the audience. On one hand, Osterkamp reveled in its lively, balletesque passages, but she also gave every considered ounce of gravitas to its knotty, pensively workmanlike explorations in Second Viennese School melodicism.

That lighthearted/rigorous dichotomy pervaded much of the rest of the material. Many of the pieces were miniatures, including a concluding set of five of Bernstein’s Seven Anniveraries. Osterkamp revealed how rather than being written with specific friends in mind, Bernstein had devised them as a suite of neo-baroque dance numbers: they’d been kicking around his “song junkyard” for years before the composer started doling them out as presents.

Much of the material on the album has never been previously recorded. Who knew that Bernstein wrote a piano sonata? That he could actually play its jackhammer staccato and whirlwind curlicues at age twenty is impressive, to say the least, and Osterkamp held up her end mightily. There’s also a lingering deep-sky passage in the second movement that sounds like it was nicked from the final movement of the Quartet For the End of Time.

Wait – Messiaen hadn’t written that yet. Which speaks to the astonishing range of idioms Bernstein had assimilated by that time. Was this juvenalia? In the sense that it’s gratuitously cross-genre and showoffy, sure. But it was also a rewarding glimpse into the young composer’s mindset.

The rest of the program followed suit, from enigmatic twelve-tone-ish romps that recalled Bernstein’s contemporary Vincent Persichetti, to the briefest flicker of West Side Story riffage that flashed by in what seemed like a nanosecond. Osterkamp couldn’t resist telling the crowd to keep their eyes open for that one.

She played the concert on a Spirio, Steinway’s analog player piano which can deliver both perfect playback of what’s just been played on it, as well as dynamically nuanced versions of the hours and hours of digital “rolls” available. She left it alone to recreate Bernstein’s own interpretation of Ravel while video of the actual performance, from Paris in the late 50s, played on the screen overhead. For pretty much everyone in the crowd, it was as close to seeing Bernstein himself playing solo onstage as we’ll ever get.

Wednesday night at Drom, power trio Eljuri had been hinting for awhile that they were going to take the music straight into roots reggae. So when frontwoman/guitarist Cecilia Villar Eljuri finally led the band into a couple of bars of Peter Tosh’s Get Up, Stand Up, and from there into Bob Marley’s Exodus, it was an impactful payoff. The emphasis wasn’t on getting out, but a ‘movement of jah people,” which dovetailed with Eljuri’s own fearlessly relevant, sometimes incendiary lyricism. That defiant, populist focus made the band an apt choice to top the bill at this benefit concert for the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Singing mostly in Spanish in a clear, bright voice, Eljuri’s persistent message was one of resistance and solidarity, through a mix of songs taken mostly from her most recent album La Lucha (The Struggle). Last year this blog called her “this era’s David Gilmour of rock en Español,” and she validated that description. The band opened with the album’s title track, setting the stage for the rest of their hour onstage, Eljuri alternating between jangly, funk-tinged lines and aching, screaming, resonant Pink Floyd-style leads. She hit her twelve-string pedal for a glittering, chimey take of Indiferencia, her drummer – fresh off the plane from Venezuela and already making a mark with his unpredictable, counterintuitive fills – adding cumbia-style flair on the turnaounds.

They built brooding, dramatic intensity with the bolero-tinged anthem El Viento and later took the sound further upward to epic art-rock grandeur with a long, searing take of the revolutionary thirst anthem Sed. Then the band took a turn toward cheery new wave with Right Now. The bassist switched between a terse, low-key pulse and serpentine climbs up the scale, especially when the groove moved further toward the Caribbean. One of the best songs of the night was a darkly stately, slowly crescendoing anthem written by Eljuri’s mom.

Ani Cordero played an elegantly impassioned opening set solo on nylon-string guitar, drawing mostly from her latest, fearlessly political album Querido Mundo. Calmly and resolutely, she reminded that crowd that in times like these, we shouldn’t get too escapist: if there was ever a moment to be a presence protesting the daily lunacy wafting from the Oval Office, that time is now. She got the crowd singing along to the insistently bouncy anti-police brutality anthem Me Tumba, then ran through Victor Jara’s bittersweet protest song Deja la Vida Volar, from her 2014 album of classic political songs, Recordar. She closed with a jaunty take of the old Puerto Rican plena hit Ay Choferito.

A lawyer from the NYCLU explained between sets that one new constituency they’ve been helping since the Swamp Cabinet took office is latino immigrants on Long Island, whose children are being detained by police under the pretext of investigating gang involvement. When the cops don’t find any reason to hold the kids any longer, they turn them over to the INS.

Drom continues to be Manhattan’s home to interesting sounds from around the globe: the acts we’ll be seeing at Lincoln Center in the coming years typically make their US debut here. One auspicious upcoming show here is on Sept 30 at 8 with wild accordion-driven Chilean psychedelic band Pascuala Ilabaca y Fauna making their US debut. $15 adv tix are highly recommended.